November 13, 2004; Washington, D.C.: My optimism may be naïve, but naivety isn’t so bad, because it comes with hope and you need hope before you can make real change for the better. Dream big if you are going to dream at all.

I leave for Brazil tomorrow to work in the favelas for six months. I guess I’m ready; I can get by in Portuguese, and have a place to stay for the first week until I find an apartment and get going on my project.

I will be working with Viva Rio, a decade old nonprofit formed in response to a series of shocking murders in 1993, where 8 street children and 21 others were killed. Viva Rio was formed to carry the torch and fight violence in Rio, particularly in the favelas. Now they are working on over 20 projects. I’ll be working on just one, COAV.

COAV stands for Children in Organized Armed Violence. I’ll be writing more about the details later. Right now, the important part of this is that I will be working with and on behalf of children in some of the bleakest circumstances: economically impoverished and constantly threatened by systematic violence. I cant help but think how much circumstance matters when I read about cases like this. And no matter how much American ideology tells me we are responsible for our own success and failures, I still wonder how successful I would have been if I was born into other circumstances.

I have been thinking about my goals for this trip. Professionally, the goals are clear: to build an advocacy strategy and to help Viva Rio to become more able to get helpful legislation enacted all to keep kids from joining the armed drug wars in Rio. Really, that is a daunting and noble goal, but any progress made is worth it, even if progress is keeping the problem from growing.

At a personal level, my goals are more abstract. I want to learn and I want to live out my values. And I feel an obligation to help in areas where I am able to and to help people, who by luck of circumstance, need help to break a cycle or the poverty trap. I think each person’s well-being is as important as mine, and I want everyone to have a shot at a good and safe life. So, helping a population that has pretty tough odds of reaching that goal, children with almost no prospect of economic survival except joining an armed drug faction, seems like a good place to put the values into action.

Re: learning … I want to be able to understand the different faces or poverty, advocacy and economics so I can think up what to do later to solve the problems of poverty on a macro scale.

A teacher once said to me there are four stages of learning, the first is not knowing what you don’t know. The second is knowing what you don’t know. (That’s about where I am) The third is knowing. The fourth is being able to teach.

I’ll settle for knowing for now. If I am going to go on and try think up ideas for projects or policies that could ameliorate or end poverty (no sense in dreaming small) then I really need to understand the problems and the dynamics (are the causes of poverty external, from the national or global economy? Or is it something intrinsic in certain communities, poor education, no capital? Or most likely a mix or these and more?). I’ll do my best to go one problem and one project at a time, but all throughout I will be filing away information on different possibilities and keeping hope that a big picture will form. And from that, I will start to dream of big picture solutions.

That is the point of the Advocacy Project isn’t it? To learn, record and use information from the field to help other organizations improve.

Well, I want to learn, record and understand, and then mull over all the possible solutions. But that is for when I come back. In the meantime, you can get a record of what I am filing away and in my third stage of learning and about how well the COAV project is coming along from my next blog.